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Cooking with Linux - Searching for the Ultimate Desktop Enhancements

François! The kitchen is a disaster! What are all these computers
and computer parts doing all over the floor? I nearly broke something
tripping over the stack of hard drives you conveniently put right inside
the door. You are trying to build the Ultimate Linux Box? Yes, I know
it's the theme of this month's issue, but you can achieve that
goal without making the place look like a parts superstore. Honestly,
mon ami, must we go through this every time this issue appears?
Last year, it was a supercomputer cluster. This year, it's...what
are you building anyhow?

Never mind. It is my belief, François, that the Ultimate Linux Box
isn't necessarily the one with the fastest processor or the one with
a googolbyte of RAM, although that certainly would be very cool. It's
the box that lets me get access to the information I want right
now. Luckily, that Linux system is often the one we are already
running—with a few enhancements, that is. You might think you have to go a long
way for those enhancements, but some already are installed as part of
your Linux system. What you must do is turn them on. I'll explain later,
mon ami. It appears that our guests have arrived.

Welcome, everyone! It is wonderful to see you all here at Chez
Marcel,
where exquisite wines meet exceptional Linux and open-source software. Sit
down and make yourselves comfortable. François, please head down to the
wine cellar. There are two cases of 1999 Elia Brunello by Colleceto Di
Palazzesi from Tuscany, Italy, in the East Wing. Please, hurry back. I'm
sure our guests are more than ready for a glass of wine.

It is good to have you here, mes amis. François and I were just
discussing what can transform a great Linux box into the Ultimate Linux
Box, and I was suggesting the answer might be software.

Whenever I sit down to a new Linux desktop, the first change I make is to
the panel, whether it be KDE or GNOME. Each environment can incorporate
applets into the panel—compact little extensions or programs that can
give you access to resources or information at a glance (or a click). One
of the most useful I know of is the dictionary applet. Second to
that is the weather applet, which, if I can't look out of the window,
lets me know the weather conditions outside.

Adding these applets is easy. If you are running KDE, right-click
on a blank section of your Kicker panel and select Add Applet to
Panel. The Add Applet dialog appears with a list of programs you
can use to populate your Kicker panel. Each program (or applet) is listed
alphabetically with a short description. Look for the dictionary applet
and the weather applet as well. To add an applet, simply click the Add to
Panel button.

Figure 1. Several applets are available. Scroll down and select the dictionary and weather applets.

To use the dictionary, simply enter a word. There's no configuration
for the dictionary applet, but you need to right-click on the weather
icon to configure it for your location. GNOME desktop users follow an
almost identical process for installing applets. Right-click on the
bottom (or top) panel and select Add to Panel. A window of the same
name appears with a list of available applets (Figure 2). Once again,
select Dictionary Look up and Weather Report. Click Add, or drag your
applets to the panel in the location of your choice.

Figure 2. Adding applets under GNOME is very similar.

As with the KDE example, you need to configure the weather applet by
right-clicking and selecting Preferences. Whether you are running KDE or
GNOME, clicking on the weather icon brings up a detailed report of
your local conditions. Check out Figure 3 for a sample of these applets
on both desktops.

Figure 3. The weather and dictionary applets in their respective desktop environments.

Now, our desktops have become increasingly useful with only a little
change. We are constantly up to date on weather conditions, and we can do
word searches from the panel. Speaking of applets and searches, here's
another great one—this time for GNOME users. It's called Deskbar,
and it's another must-have. Deskbar is a one-stop infocenter that uses a
system of plugins to give you dynamic searches in all those places that
are important to you. It can do lookups on your favorite search engine,
search through your address book, find files, open files or folders for you,
locate applications and more (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Deskbar is your one-stop search field. It can help you locate information on the Web, contacts in your address books and more.

To get Raphael Slinckx's Deskbar on your panel, load it from the
applet Add to Panel dialog in GNOME. Recent distributions should have
it included, but if it isn't there, check out the Web site (see
the on-line Resources). You always can download
source, but binaries also are available on the site for a number of
popular distributions. To use Deskbar, simply type in the term for whatever
you are seeking, and it will do the rest.

When I mentioned plugins, what I didn't say is that not all of them
are activated by default (though most are). For instance, Deskbar
will not only post your search to Google, but it also will search as you
type. This is Google Live and requires that you have an account with
Google. Once you do, you can activate this plugin. In other cases, such as
the dictionary search, you'll find that the plugin is inactive primarily
because the dictionary applet already serves that function. To activate
(or deactivate) plugins, right-click on Deskbar and select Preferences.

Deskbar even can search using Beagle if you have the package
installed. Beagle, you ask? Ah, that might take a few minutes. Perhaps
we should have François make sure all your glasses are full while I set things
up on this end.

Beagle is a desktop search engine. It is designed to bring to the
desktop what search engines like Google bring to the Web. Beagle indexes
your documents, presentations, notes, music, images, e-mail (KMail and
Evolution) and a whole lot more. Beagle is in the early stages of
development, but it is already very usable and fast. To stay on
the leading edge of this exciting project, you really need to build it
from source, which, I admit, can be daunting while you seek out
all of the appropriate prerequisite packages. However, a visit to the
Beagle Web site (see Resources) will point
you to binaries for many popular distributions, including SUSE, Fedora,
Mandriva, Ubuntu and others. Some distributions have Beagle in their
download or contrib sites, so check there first.

Beagle does its indexing in the background with the use of a dæmon named
beagled. You can start beagled at the command line
(you do not have to run as root), or you can fire up the Beagle search
window. That program is named beagle-search. When you start the
program, it looks for the running Beagle dæmon. If it doesn't find it,
a button on the search window lets you launch the process. Beagle starts
indexing immediately, but if you have a lot of data—and don't we
all—it may take a while before you can do a comprehensive search.

Searching is child's play. Simply type your search term in the Find
field, and Beagle immediately returns everything it finds relevant to
your search (Figure 5). By default, it locates information based on
the date. Click Sort on Beagle's menu bar, and you can change the sort
criteria to Name or Relevance.

Figure 5. Beagle's desktop search is fast and simple.

Beagle originally was written as a GNOME project, but it works very well in
a KDE environment and makes no distinction as to what environment
you run. You can use the default beagle-search interface
with KDE, but you may want to take a look at Stephan Binner's Kerry
Beagle, a great KDE interface to the Beagle desktop search. Kerry
provides some great additional enhancements, including a system tray icon
so that the search interface drops nicely out of sight when it's not
needed. Some distributions have the package in their contrib repositories
(SUSE and Kubuntu, to name a couple), but source also is available from the
KDE-Look.org site (see Resources).

When you run Kerry Beagle, it starts minimized with a magnifying-glass
icon in the system tray. Click the icon to bring up the search window or
press Ctrl-Shift-spacebar. When the search dialog appears, it
checks to see if the Beagle dæmon (beagled) is running. If it
isn't, you are given the opportunity to start it now. To search for
a term, enter it in the Search field at the top and click Find. Search
results appear below, with a default of five to a page (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Kerry Beagle is a great KDE-based front end to the Beagle desktop search program.

Your total number of results is listed in the bottom left. Click Next
Results to see the next five items. You can change this default of
five by right-clicking on the system tray icon and selecting Configure
Kerry. Aside from the number of search results per page, the configure
dialog lets you add additional folders to index (and others to exclude
from indexing). Having to start the Beagle dæmon each time you log in
can be a pain. Luckily, automatically starting the dæmon when you log
in to KDE is another thing you can set through the configuration menu.

The clock on the wall, mes amis, she is telling us that the hour
is late. We soon should be heading home to dreams of our own individual
ultimate Linux systems. François no doubt will try to create something
out of the chaos in kitchen. In the meantime, I know that he would
be delighted to refill your glasses one more time before we say good
night. Please raise your glasses, mes amis, and let us all drink
to one another's health. A votre santé Bon
appétit!

Marcel Gagné is an award-winning writer living in Mississauga,
Ontario. He is the author of the all new Moving to Ubuntu
Linux,
his fifth book from Addison-Wesley. He also makes regular television
appearances as Call for Help's Linux guy. Marcel is also a pilot, a
past Top-40 disc jockey, writes science fiction and fantasy, and folds a
mean Origami T-Rex. He can be reached via e-mail at
mggagne@salmar.com.
You can discover lots of other things (including great wine links)
from his Web site at www.marcelgagne.com.